Statistical Commission Forty-seventh session 8 11 March 2016 Item 4(a) of the provisional agenda Items for information: World Statistics Day Background document Available in English only World Statistics Day Prepared by the United Nations Statistics Division 1
Summary 1. On 20 October 2015 the second World Statistics Day was celebrated by more than 110 countries and several international and non-governmental organizations. Its dedicated worldstatisticsday.org website drew about 30 thousand user sessions, setting a record among all United Nations Statistics Division s websites. The hashtag #StatsDay15 tracked activities by national statistical offices and other partners worldwide, garnering more than 2400 tweets by 1500 contributors and a total audience of 36 million in a month. Official website of World Statistics Day 2015 2. The official website of World Statistics Day was launch on March 4 2015, at the 46 th Session of the Statistical Commission. Since then, 47,000 unique users visited the website, who conducted 157,000 page views in approximately 64,000 sessions.. Traffic to the website peaked on 20 October 2015, reaching 30,000 page views by 13,000 users on that day alone and setting a record for the websites that are maintained by the Statistics Division. This high traffic volume reflected the fact that a large number of national statistical offices, international organizations and social media provided direct links to the official World Statistics Day website from their own websites and through their social media outlets. 3. It is also worth noting that close to 19 % of the users accessed the World Statistics Day 2015 website from mobile devices, as the website was optimised to support such devises without losing content and quality. 2
Figure 1 below illustrates the evolution in the number of users, sessions and page views over time, from its launch on until the third week of November 2015, and the high level of traffic generated during the weeks shortly before and after World Statistics Day 2015. Figure 1. Traffic generated to the World Statistics Day 2015 website World Statistics Day 2015 promotional video 4. The division also launched a video commemorating World Statistics Day 2015 during 46th session of the Statistical Commission on 5 March 2015. The video, which was hosted on the divisions you tube channel (available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhdm21azwpg), has been viewed close to 9,500 times and for a total watch time of 5,745 minutes. The countires with the highest number of views were United States, India, United Kingdom, Spain and Australia, respectively. The day of the celebration was day with the highest number of 1,147 viewers of this video. 3
Figure 2 below illustrates the evolution in the number of views and watch time of the video between May and November 2015, which again peaked around World Statistics Day 2015. Figure 2. Views and watch time of World Statistics Day 2015 promotional video 5. It is worth noting that the view distribution shows 60% of the view came from it being embedded in external site which is an indication of it reach through various national statistical offices, international organisations and non-governmental organisations. The World Statistics Day 2015 on Twitter 6. The Second World Statistics Day celebration had a significant presence in the social media sphere. From its launch in May 2015, a social media strategy was developed to promote the use of the hash tag #StatsDay15 to raise awareness among the public of the event and help users find and 4
disseminate messages related to it. This hashtag was heavily used nearing the date of the celebration and few weeks after the event day, and helped track activities by national statistical offices and other partners worldwide. In particular, #StatsDay15 garnering more than 2400 tweets by 1500 contributors, reaching a total audience of 36 million users between the last two weeks of October and the first 2 weeks in November 2015. Figure 3 below shows the breakdown of the 2400 tweets. Figure 3. Breakdown of tweets with the #Statsday15 hashtag between October 20 and November 11 2015. 7. The celebration of World Statistics Day 2015 also generated a significant increase in traffic on the division twitter account, which uses the handle @UNStats. The traffic in the month of October compared to the previous month generated a 17% increase in new followers, and an impression increase from 33 thousand to 68 thousand. 5
8. It worth noting that the top tweets was the WSD2015 Data Visualization Challenge, organised by the division as part of the celebrations of World Statistics Day 2015. The top media tweet was the Better Data. Better Lives. picture of the statistics division staff. 6